Nine of the ten lowest ranked firms in America are cable and telephone companies, according to a new report from research firm Temkin Group.

A poll ranking customer service at 235 U.S. companies across 19 industries found cable companies dead last, quickly followed by Internet Service Providers (often those same cable operators).

Participants were asked to rate their satisfaction with different companies on a scale of “1” (very dissatisfied) to “7” (completely satisfied). Not very many participants gave high marks to their telecommunications service provider. Temkin’s resulting net satisfaction score found familiar names in the cable and telephone business scraping the bottom.

America’s worst provider? Charter Communications, which managed an embarrassing dead last 22 percent satisfaction score for television service. Time Warner Cable managed second worst for television at 25%, followed by Cox and Cablevision’s Optimum service (both 28%). Bottom rated Internet service came from Qwest (now CenturyLink), Verizon (presumably DSL), and Charter — all scoring just 31%.

Oddly, Temkin’s survey participants gave top marks to the long-irrelevant AOL for Internet service, which may mean those dial-up customers don’t know any better. Highest marks in television service went to Bright House Communications, which ironically depends on Time Warner Cable for most of its programming negotiations.

Most suspect the ratings show long-term customer dissatisfaction with endless rate increases, poor customer service and reliability, and lack of choice in an increasingly expensive television lineup.

The Temkin Group gathered its data from an online survey of 10,000 consumers in the U.S. during January 2013, all asked to rate their experiences with companies over the past 60 days.

Waiting for Comcast and Verizon to offer cutting edge broadband to 620,000 Baltimore city residents and businesses appears to be going nowhere, so the city is hiring an Internet consultant to consider whether to sell access to its existing fiber network.

Baltimore officials spent at least a year trying to convince Google to launch its fiber network in the city only to be bypassed in favor of Kansas City, Austin, and Provo, Utah. Local unions and community groups have also attempted to embarrass the local phone company by publicly protesting Verizon’s lack of interest in expanding its fiber optic network FiOS in Baltimore. Comcast has proved a disappointment for many, with the latest technology going to other cities well before Baltimore gets improved service.

Baltimore’s Board of Estimates voted to spend $157,000 to hire Magellan Advisors to produce a cost-benefit analysis of expanding the city’s current fiber infrastructure to deliver better Internet access.

“I’m paying more here for lesser service, so I think one of the things we want to try to do is look at that, look at what [current companies] offer and try to incentivize people to offer more,” Baltimore’s chief information officer Chris Tonjes told the Baltimore Business Journal. “In the short term, we’re going to do a study. In the medium run, we’re going to try to renegotiate the cable franchise agreement. In the longer run we want to make it more profitable for providers to come in here and offer the expanded service.”

Like many cities, Baltimore already owns and operates its own fiber ring, built with public funds to support the city’s public safety radio system. Like many municipal institutional fiber networks, Baltimore’s fiber ring is underutilized. Public safety and other institutional users often use just a fraction of available capacity. Despite the fact such networks are often oversized, they are rarely controversial because they do not typically compete with commercial providers and are usually off-limits to the public.

As Baltimore prepares to update their existing fiber infrastructure, Magellan will study the implications of leasing excess capacity to third-party providers that can sell broadband access to private businesses and individuals. Even Comcast and Verizon would be welcome to lease capacity.

Neither company has shown much interest, and the proposal received a strong rebuke from Maryland Sen. Catherine Pugh (D-Baltimore City):

Pugh

For the most part, municipally-built broadband networks have the economic chips stacked against them and, where tried, have saddled local taxpayers with a mountain of debt and half-built networks that are then sold at fire-sale prices to vulture investors. Taxpayers in Provo, Utah, for instance, spent $40 million to build a relatively small and modest network only to sell it for $1 a few years later because they underestimated the massive costs of operating, upgrading and maintaining it.

But Provo is just the latest exhibit in a long pantheon of such failed initiatives that include Groton, Conn., ($38 million taxpayer loss) and Marietta, Ga., ($35 million taxpayer loss). Cities as large as Philadelphia, New York and Chicago and as small as Lompoc, Calif., and Acworth, Ga., have also tried and failed to launch their own broadband networks — or simply gave up.

Pugh’s editorial, published in both the Wall Street Journal and The Baltimore Sun, failed to disclose Pugh has received political campaign contributions from both Comcast and Verizon. More importantly, Pugh did not bother to mention she is the president-elect of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, a group with close ties to both Comcast and Verizon Communications.

Among the “member corporations” of the NBCSL — companies who “weigh in” on the policies promoted by the group: AT&T, Comcast, CTIA – The Wireless Association, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon.

Among the NBCSL’s roundtable members: AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon

For the fourth consecutive year, Verizon hosted its Black History Month open house at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in downtown Baltimore. This year, among Verizon’s special guests: Maryland Senator and president-elect of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators Catherine Pugh. Comcast has also opened its checkbook to the NBCSL. Among the contributions — $50,000 to form the “NBCSL/Comcast Broadband Legislative Fellowship” to “increase efforts to conduct research and develop solutions regarding broadband adoption among African Americans.”

Opening up a competitive, lower-priced broadband alternative owned by the citizens of Baltimore is not one of Pugh’s favored solutions to be sure.

The NBCSL has been more than a little preoccupied with the business agendas of its corporate members. The group’s glowing endorsement of the Comcast-NBCUniversal merger was so positive, Comcast continues to present the group’s submission urging approval of the merger on its website. In 2011, the NBCSL signed on to the campaign to get government approval of the now-dead merger of AT&T and T-Mobile USA, claiming it was in the best interests of African-Americans. Just this month, Time Warner Cable quoted the group’s comments on the dispute between the cable company and CBS on its website.

Stop the Cap! has refuted claims that public broadband is a financial failure in the past. Read our fact check here.

Although Comcast has been the dominant cable provider in Baltimore for years, its monopoly status is “de facto” only, because federal law prohibits exclusive cable franchise agreements. That being said, no other well-known cable provider will agree to offer service in competition with another. Overbuilders — small private entities that have business plans that depend on competing with incumbent operators, are few and far between. For most Americans, the only cable competition comes from satellite providers or the phone company. Satellite television lacks a broadband option and Verizon’s local broadband infrastructure is limited to providing DSL service.

Tonjes

Tonjes hopes the possibility of a public broadband alternative might shake up the city’s broadband landscape, but not every neighborhood is now passed by the city’s fiber ring.

Alito

Justice Samuel Alito was forced to recuse himself from nearly six dozen cases brought to the Supreme Court in the last 10 months because the Alito family owns stock in many of the corporations involved in litigation.

When Alito’s wife Martha Ann’s father died last year, the Alito family inherited a wealth of stock worth up to $1.25 million in some of America’s largest companies, including AT&T and Verizon Communications.

The Associated Press reports Alito’s tardy financial disclosure for 2012 revealed the justice’s reasons for recusal: his sudden ownership of shares in large telecom, pharmaceutical, oil and gas, and tobacco companies.

Federal law requires justices to step away from cases where there is a financial conflict of interest. Alito’s inherited stock represents just such a conflict.

In one case, however, Alito found himself holding Comcast Corp. stock after hearing arguments in a massive class action antitrust case representing two million customers the plaintiffs argued were being overcharged by an illegitimate cable monopoly.

Alito’s Comcast stock was purchased and sold last December. The Court’s 5-4 decision, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, was announced March 27. Alito’s deciding vote fundamentally raised the bar on future lawsuits, making it much more difficult for class action cases to be brought before the courts.

The Comcast suit, in the courts since 2003, argued that cable subscribers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware were overcharged at least $875 million because of Comcast’s efforts to monopolize cable service in the Philadelphia area. Comcast amassed its dominant position by buying or swapping cable systems in the region to create a single large cable provider serving the majority of southern New Jersey, Delaware, and southeastern Pennsylvania. By 2002, the lawsuit claimed, Comcast had achieved a 77.8 percent market share.

Comcast argued the lawsuit was too complicated and its proposed method of calculating damages was faulty. The Court’s conservative justices agreed with Comcast, finding the lawsuit fell “far short of establishing that damages are capable of measurement.”

• Voting for Comcast’s position: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
• Voting against Comcast: Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

A study recently published in the Minnesota Law Review found the current Supreme Court is by far the most corporate-friendly of any court in at least 65 years, noting “the Roberts court is indeed highly pro-business — the conservatives extremely so and the liberals only moderately liberal.”

The top two most likely to vote in favor of big business among all justices seated since 1946 are Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr.

“There was a time when being ‘business-friendly’ meant giving corporations a leg-up and a level playing field because doing so creates jobs and bolsters the economy,” wrote Supreme Court reporter Jonathan Valania. “Today, ‘business-friendly’ means letting corporations socialize their costs while privatizing their profits. It means letting corporation literally write the laws that govern them. It means rolling back regulations and de-fanging oversight [….] What we are really talking about is corporatism.”

Roberts

Brian Roberts, the CEO of Comcast-NBC-Universal has two things to celebrate this week:

1. His exclusive invitation to golf with President Barack Obama at the Vineyard Golf Club on Martha’s Vineyard, joined by World Bank president Jim Kim and former U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk;
2. He is a billionaire again.

Thanks to a series of rate increases and improving broadband sales, Comcast’s chief executive has now amassed just over one billion dollars in assets, estimates Forbes magazine.

Much of his net worth rests in more than $800 million in Comcast stock controlled by Roberts. Comcast shares are up almost 30 percent in the last year and over 105 percent in the past 24 months. Comcast reported revenue of $16.27 billion in the second quarter alone.

Comcast’s earnings fueled the buyout of NBC-Universal.

Roberts had been a billionaire club member before, appearing on Forbes‘ 400 Richest Americans list in 1999 after inheriting the majority of his father’s stock, worth $750 million. By 2001, that stock increased in value to $1.2 billion. But by 2003, depressed Comcast share prices meant Roberts’ net value dropped to $625 million.

Executive compensation at most cable operators has increased right along with the prices customers pay for service.

Comcast’s usage caps are back for customers in three states.

Comcast has decided usage caps are in the future for more of its broadband customers.

Effective Sept. 1 XFINITY Internet Service will be capped to 300GB of monthly usage in central Kentucky, Savannah, Ga., and Jackson, Miss. Comcast says the plan provides “additional choice and flexibility.”

We’re uncertain how it does that, exactly.

Comcast will have the additional choice of slapping a $10 overlimit fee for allowance offenders for every extra 50GB of data consumed.

But the company says it will be initially flexible in how it penalizes those heavy users.

“In order for our customers to get accustomed to the new data usage plan, we will be implementing a program that gives you three courtesy months for exceeding the 300GB in any 12-month period,” writes Comcast in a new FAQ. “That means you will only be subject to overage charges if you exceed the 300GB for a fourth time in a 12-month period. On the fourth (and any subsequent occurrence), you will be notified that you have exceeded your 300GB via an email and in-browser notification, that an additional 50GB has automatically been allocated to your account, and that applicable charges will be applied to your bill.”

Choice and flexibility for the customer or Comcast’s bottom line?

Customers with questions and concerns about Comcast’s expanding Internet Overcharging scheme can call Comcast Customer Security Assurance at 1-877-807-6581. Customers might want to assure Comcast if they are going back to usage caps, they will start shopping for a different provider. Stop the Cap! recommends customers in these areas protest the usage caps firmly and loudly.

“There are no legitimate engineering or economic justifications for these caps,” notes consumer group Free Press. “But Comcast’s new Internet Overcharging scheme and its discriminatory treatment of competitors’ video offerings do pose a grave threat to future video competition.”

And to your wallet.

Analysts have estimated that Comcast’s profit margins on broadband service are at least 80 percent or higher. In 2008, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst Craig Moffett estimated Comcast’s data margins at 80 percent, and Credit Suisse reported in fall 2010 that Comcast’s gross margins on high-speed data had grown to 93 percent.

Since withdrawing a nationwide cap of 250GB in 2012, Comcast had tested usage caps only in Nashville, Tenn., and Tucson, Ariz.

Stop the Cap! thanks reader “MrPaulAR” for the news tip.